Dialogues with Contemporary Political Theorists

I am sure that many must have shared my own experience of speaking with philosophers and political theorists, which is that having spoken to them it somehow seemed easier to understand and appreciate their written words, especially where those written words seemed cold and forbidding by contrast with a person who was engaging and welcoming. Unfortunately, we are not always in a position to meet personally all those whose books we would like to read, but the next best thing must surely be to hear them (or should I say read them) in conversation? A volume of interviews of this sort, if properly done—and this volume is definitely properly done—is invaluable. Nothing else can quite capture the spirit and freshness of the thinkers lucky enough to be interviewed for us lucky enough to read them. One could, of course, be sceptical and suggest that we are simply tempted by the interview as a sort of short cut to the substantive works. But that is not true, any more than speaking to an author is any substitute for reading him or her: but as suggested above, it can make a great deal of difference to how, and how well, we read an author. The same is true for this volume of interviews. Do we learn anything we would not learn by reading their books and articles? Probably not much—assuming that we have read all their books and articles. But one certainly learns something of tone, intention and ambition, the journey they see themselves on, and their sense of the shape of their output. These things are not easily learned from the works themselves, and learning them can help in our reading of those works.

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